Brian Selznick

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The film which marked his life was A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. Though silent, the costumes, montage and cinematography won him over to the point that in turn he wanted to tell the story of a boy interweaving it with episodes from the life of the French director. “Reading a book I discovered by chance that Georges had a collection of robots that was destroyed after his death”, remembers Brian Selznick, the American writer and illustrator, who was born in 1966. “And so I imagined a boy picking through rubbish to put one together”. This was the idea for The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a fascinating mélange of word and image, a successful novel in graphics which Martin Scorsese chose for his first film in 3D, Hugo, screening in cinemas from 3 February.

“I started to tell the story as though it were a film, with the scenes, the montage etc., keeping in mind that in children’s illustrated books what happens when you turn the page is very important”, says the writer from New Jersey who moved to New York when he was 20, and whose first employment was as a sales assistant in a children’s book store. “’The Houdini box’ was the first story I illustrated and it was published while I was working there in 1991. I would say to people who asked me if I knew of a good book for children of around 10 years of age, ‘I know a perfect one’ and it was mine!” The book was successful, but that was not the case with his next six books, but an editor encouraged Selznick to persevere. “However, I began feeling I wanted to do something different but I didn’t know what that could be. It was Maurice Sendak, one of the most famous children’s book illustrators (who wrote Where the Wild Things Are, with the film of the same name by Spike Jonze, editor’s note), who told me that in his mind I wasn’t making the most of my potential.

This is how Hugo Cabret was born. It was 2007”. It ended up on Scorsese’s desk even before it was finished, and the director loved it so much he passed it on to both his daughter and wife, and both were enthusiastic. “I met Scorsese in London, in his office; Dante Ferretti and Francesca Loschiavo were also there. I was terrified at the thought of meeting such a legend; instead, I discovered a man with whom I had much in common, a brilliant artist who was very inspiring. He described how he would use 3D and assured me the book would be followed to the smallest detail. He then spoke of the emotion he felt watching early films, of the rudimentary techniques used for special effects even when it was about the simple arrival of a train at a station. Also, as I would have liked that in some way the book contained a reference to the Lumière brothers, the film recreates in a revolutionary way the scene of the locomotive in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat”.